Human Adaptation to Biodiversity Change: Building and Testing Concepts, Methods, and Tools for Understanding and Supporting Autonomous Adaptation

生物多样性变化直接威胁着发展中国家农村以生存为导向的家庭的生计、粮食安全以及文化和生态完整性。人们将被迫以减轻生物多样性和生态系统服务丧失或加剧丧失的方式作出反应。前所未有的物种灭绝正在进行中，气候变化正在影响物种的范围和物候，导致新的物种配置以不可预测的方式影响生态系统服务。随着人口增长带来的气候变化和栖息地的持续改变，“新型”生态系统将变得更加普遍。在联合国国际生物多样性年，科学家和政策制定者必须认识到，人类、生物多样性和生态系统必须共同进化和共同适应。然而，人类对生物多样性变化的适应并没有成为任何国际、区域或国家科学或政策论坛的主题。由于缺乏关于HABC的科学研究，因此科学家和决策者缺乏任务、概念框架、知识和工具来预测或预测人类的反应及其实际或潜在的结果、协同作用和反馈。事实上，“需要一项重要的新研究努力来鼓励决策者一起考虑生物多样性、气候变化和人类生计”（Royal Society 2007）。与此同时，有人呼吁在适应思维方面进行“范式转变”，从自上而下的规划转向支持地方适应。地方适应努力得不到外界的注意、协调和帮助，除非决策者认识到自主适应进程的重要性和程度，并了解影响其结果的因素，否则适应和缓解政策可能是无效的或适得其反的。该项目的目的是启动适当的概念框架、方法和综合模型的发展，以了解人类对生物多样性和相关生态系统服务变化的适应，最终可用于预测生物多样性高度依赖社会的生物多样性、生态系统服务和人类福祉的结果，并为这些产出的效用提供证据，以供新的研究人员和决策者网络使用。开发概念、方法、工具和模型的基石是：a)当地信息或知识系统和监测能力；b)当地对生物多样性和相关生态系统服务的评估；C)将生物资源和生态系统服务整合到对生计过程的理解中，d)评估感知、风险、需求和响应能力，e)理解生物和福利的结果和反馈。该项目的合作伙伴来自牛津大学、肯特大学和亚非学院的人类学、经济学和生态学/生物学，以及来自南非和印度的合作伙伴。合作伙伴将在第一次密集研讨会上使用情景构建协议共同阐述概念框架。然后，团队逐步开发和评估研究方案和方法，并在西高止山脉的一个实地研究地点收集原始数据，并初步模拟结果。第二次讲习班修订了设想，并准备了第二个实地数据收集阶段。这种迭代允许进一步夯实概念框架和方法，并基于关于不同变量如何交互的更好决策，开发和测试更强大、更少聚合的模型。在第二个实地研究阶段之后，对情景进行修订，对数据进行综合分析和建模，并确定对监测生物多样性、生态系统服务和生物多样性/生态系统变化的人类福祉有用的变量、变量集或系统状态指标。一个科学政策网络启动了（见影响计划）。

Biodiversity change directly threatens the livelihoods, food security, and cultural and ecological integrity of rural subsistence-oriented households across the developing world. People will be forced to respond to it in ways that either mitigate loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services or that exacerbate losses. An unprecedented extinction of species is underway, and climate change is affecting species' range and phenology, leading to new species configurations that affect ecosystem services in unpredictable ways. With climate change and continued habitat alteration entailed in human population growth, 'novel' ecosystems will become even more prevalent. In the UN International Year of Biodiversity, scientists and policy makers must recognise that humans, biodiversity, and ecosystems must co-evolve and co-adapt. However, Human Adaptation to Biodiversity Change is not considered as theme in any international, regional, or national science or policy forums. There is a dearth of scientific research about HABC, so scientists and policy makers lack mandates, conceptual frameworks, knowledge, and tools to project or predict human responses and their actual or potential outcomes, synergies, and feedbacks. Indeed, 'A significant new research effort is required to encourage decision makers to consider biodiversity, climate change and human livelihoods together' (Royal Society 2007). At the same time, there is a call for a 'paradigm shift' in adaptation thinking away from top-down planning and toward supporting local adaptation. Local adaptation efforts go unnoticed, uncoordinated, and unaided by outsiders and, unless policy makers become aware of the importance and extent of autonomous adaptation processes and understand what influences their outcomes, adaptation and mitigation policies may be ineffective or counter-productive. This project's aim is to kickstart the development of appropriate conceptual frameworks, methods and integrated models for understanding human adaptation to change in biodiversity and related ecosystem services that can eventually be used to predict outcomes for biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being in highly biodiversity dependent societies, and provide evidence for the utility of these outputs to a new network of researchers and policy makers. The building blocks for development of concepts, methods, tools and models are a) local information or knowledge systems and monitoring capacity, b) local valuation of biodiversity and related ecosystem services; c) integrating biological resources and ecosystem services into an understanding of livelihood processes, d) assessing perceptions, risks, needs, and ability to respond, and e) understanding biological and welfare outcomes and feedbacks. The project joins partners from anthropology, economics and ecology/biology at Oxford, Kent and SOAS, with partners from South Africa and India. Partners will jointly elaborate the conceptual framework in a first intensive workshop using a scenario building protocol. Then, teams incrementally develop and evaluate research protocols and methods and collect primary data in a field research site in the Western Ghats, and results are initially modeled. A second workshop revises the scenarios and prepares a second field data collection phase. This iteration permits further grounding of the conceptual framework and methods, and development and testing of a stronger, less aggregative model based on much better decisions about how different variables interact. After the second field research phase, scenarios are revised and integrated analysis and modelling of the data is done, and variables, variable sets, or system state indicators that are useful for monitoring biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being with biodiversity/ecosystem change are identified. A science-policy network is kickstarted (see impact plan).